Everything ends.

I was getting a massage.  The young woman who I go to was telling me how she was watching a show about bunkers on TV.  This show was about people who think the world is going to end, so they build bunkers.  It made me think of somebody I knew who had a trap door on  his walkway.  You pulled the trapdoor up, and there were stairs that went down to a room in his basement where he had all sorts of supplies.  He'd built it around the time of the whole Y2K thing.

I was going to tell her about this guy, so I said, "You're probably too young to remember how some people were really freaked out about the Y2K bug."

She said, "Oh no, I remember.  I was like ten years old.  My mom had jugs and jugs of water and crackers. Boxes and boxes of crackers. And buckets. She was convinced the world was going to end."

"What were the buckets for?"  I asked.  "Were they to collect rainwater or something?"

"I never knew.  But, man, she sure had a LOT of them.  I'll have to ask her sometime."

I don't know what I said after that.  I think I might have been falling asleep a little bit while she kneaded my shoulders.  I was a bit startled when she spoke again.

"But everything has to have an end.  It just makes sense.  Because everything ends."

I thought back to the day before.  I'd been looking at a website that showed abandoned buildings.  After a while, I had to go to the bathroom, so I cut through our bedroom to use the bathroom in there.  While walking through, it occurred to me that our bedroom might look like those abandoned rooms I'd been looking at on the website.  Maybe people would be walking around through our ruined house some day, wondering about the people who lived in this house.  Maybe they were in some future, standing right where I was, wondering about us, wondering what it was like.  Our house wouldn't survive forever.  What would it be?  Depopulation from some horrible pandemic? 

Something would come along.  Wouldn't matter how many buckets you had in the basement.